Count the Waves

Poems

In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic imagination to the heart's pursuits. A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."

Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection's centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic "Instantaneous Letter Writer."

Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

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Count the Waves by Sandra Beasley has me counting the ways her imaginative poems delight and surprise me. The framework of the collection is a series of poems based on The Traveler’s Vade Mecum of 1853—a compendium of phrases referenced by number as codes for conversations over long distances. Perhaps my favorite of these is “The Exhibition Was Very Beautiful” which includes the lyrical lines: “Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings./Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings.”